May 6: Muslim Brotherhood NGO Helped Set Biden Israel Policy

Hamas ceasefire ruse as Israel starts Rafah op; The booby-trapped food that wasn't; Columbia cancels graduation

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The Big Story

Senior Biden administration officials have been setting U.S. Israel policy in coordination with Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), the same anti-Israel nonprofit reportedly behind the push to sanction the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda battalion, emails obtained by The Washington Free Beacon show. 

According to a Monday report from the Beacon’s Adam Kredo, in February 2022, DAWN’s then-advocacy director, Adam Shapiro, emailed two top Pentagon officials—Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Dana Stroul and Deputy Director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency Jennifer Zakriski—raising concerns about U.S. officials interacting with Israeli “settlers.” Stroul forwarded Shapiro’s email to Hady Amr at the State Department, then the deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli and Palestinian affairs, now the Biden administration’s special representative for Palestinian affairs. Amr responded to Stroul, “We saw the reports and spoke to [Gen. Michael] Fenzel about it a day or two after it happened.” “We’re good,” Amr added.

As Tablet reported in February, Fenzel, the U.S. security coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority (USSC), has regularly lifted unverified talking points about “violent settlers” from anti-Israel NGOs in his USSC daily briefings.

DAWN, however, is not just any anti-Israel NGO. It was founded by Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi “journalist” whose violent death in 2018 served as the pretext for an domestic information operation targeting Trump and the U.S.-Saudi alliance. As Lee Smith reported for Tablet in 2019, however, Khashoggi was less a “journalist” and more a Qatari agent:

Khashoggi was handled on behalf of the Qataris by former U.S. foreign service officer Maggie Mitchell Salem, an executive at the Qatar Foundation International. In WhatsApp messages that, as Salem explained in a tweet, she shared with the [Washington] Post, she urged him “to take a harder line against the Saudi government.” In brief, she used Khashoggi’s byline to run an anti-Saudi campaign through The Washington Post. The Qatar Foundation International did not respond by press time to an email asking whether Qatari officials directed Salem to assist Khashoggi or if any were aware she was assisting him.

As the story revealed, Salem proposed story ideas to Khashoggi. She drafted articles, and reviewed them before publication. Contrary to any normative journalistic practice, neither Salem’s name nor any mention of the Qatar Foundation International appeared anywhere in those articles.

As it turns out, the holder of a U.S. visa granted to those with extraordinary abilities didn’t even write English. Because his “English abilities,” according to the article, “were limited,” Qatar Foundation International paid for a translator, who as it happens also worked at the Qatari embassy.

DAWN has honored its martyred founder by continuing to push the Qatari/Muslim Brotherhood line in the corridors of power. DAWN has advocated for the repeal of the Abraham Accords, U.N. sanctions against Israel, and U.S. travel bands and International Criminal Court sanctions against individual IDF officers. It was also the destination of choice for Josh Paul, the U.S. State Department official who resigned in protest of U.S. military aid to Israel in October. And DAWN’s executive director, Sarah Leah Whitson, a former lawyer at Human Rights Watch, has an X feed that looks like this:

Nice lady.

But DAWN has some other eyebrow-raising connections. One of the group’s founders and a former board member—he was listed as recently as February 2024 but has since been removed from DAWN’s website—is Dr. Esam Omeish, whom you may remember from previous editions of The Scroll. Omeish, an influential figure in Virginia Democratic politics, was appointed to serve on the Virginia Commission on Immigration in 2007 but was forced to resign in 2009 over remarks he’d made at a rally telling Muslims that “the jihad way is the way to liberate your land.” Omeish is also the former director of the Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, where al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki served as imam and where Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan attended services, according to reporting from The Washington Free Beacon. (Falls Church is also where American Muslims for Palestine and its parent nonprofit, AJP Educational Foundation, are headquartered.) Omeish’s son Yousof Omeish, a Yale-educated staffer for Sen. Michael Bennet (D CO), participated in a congressional staff cease-fire protest in November, and his daughter, Abrar Omeish, serves on the Fairfax County School Board, where she told graduating seniors in 2021 to remember “jihad” as they enter a “world of white supremacy.”

Another DAWN board member is Nihad Awad, the founder and executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Awad was an unindicted co-conspirator in the U.S. government’s Holy Land Foundation case and formerly served as the public relations director of the Islamic Association for Palestine, which was founded with seed money from Hamas official and fundraiser Mousa Abu Marzook and was dissolved in the HLF prosecutions for fundraising for Hamas. 

In addition to Awad, DAWN’s board boasts another individual with direct Muslim Brotherhood connections: the Tunisian-born Mongi Dhaouadi. Dhaouadi, a former executive director for the Connecticut chapter of CAIR and former senior program officer at the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, has long lobbied on behalf of the Tunisian Ennahda Party, an offshoot of the international Muslim Brotherhood, and its leader, Rached Ghannouchi. In 2016, Dhaouadi posted on Facebook that he was a “proud” member of Ennahda, and a 2017 Facebook post from the Ennahda Party Abroad identified him as the “Representative of the American Bureau.” In 2019, Dhaouadi organized Ennahda politician Mehrzia Labidi’s visit to the United States, where Labidi met with U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). 

DAWN is in turn funded by … yes, of course, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. 

As usual, we’re sure it’s all one big coincidence that the Biden administration is taking marching orders from a Muslim Brotherhood-linked think tank, founded by an operative for the Muslim Brotherhood’s main international sponsor (Qatar), in pursuit of its wider to campaign to delegitimize Israel’s war against the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas). But we doubt DAWN et al. are calling the shots. Rather, we suspect they’re telling the White House what it already wants to hear. 

Read Kredo’s report here: https://freebeacon.com/israel/biden-admin-officials-coordinated-with-anti-israel-group-to-isolate-israeli-jews-in-west-bank-emails-show/

IN THE BACK PAGES: In Rwanda, as in Israel after Oct. 7, the U.N. sided with killers over their victims, writes Ben Poser

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The Rest

→On Monday afternoon, Al Jazeera Arabic reported, citing a senior Hamas source, that Hamas had accepted a Qatari and Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire, hours after the IDF had begun warning residents of eastern Rafah to evacuate northward in anticipation of an offensive. Israeli officials warned, however, that what Hamas had accepted was an Egyptian proposal to which Israeli negotiators had not agreed, adding that Hamas’ announcement was a “ruse” designed to paint Israel as the camp refusing an agreement. Shortly before The Scroll closed Monday, the IDF reported that it had conducted 50 strikes against “terror targets” in the Rafah area, while Palestinian media reported shelling and flares in eastern Rafah. U.S. State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller reiterated Monday that the U.S. will not support the Rafah offensive “currently envisioned by Israel.”

→Scroll Senior Writer Park MacDougald has an article in Tablet today on the funding and organizing networks behind the campus protests and the broader anti-Israel protest movement. An excerpt, on the prominent involvement of Tides in the anti-Israel protests: 

Maybe it is a coincidence that a dark-money philanthropy empire tied to Obama would be bankrolling a protest movement designed to undercut American support for Israel’s war on Hamas—which just happened to be the White House nickname of one Ben Rhodes, the man responsible for building the media-NGO echo chamber that would initially sell the Iran deal and later be repurposed for domestic political warfare during the Trump years. Perhaps it is a coincidence that an Israeli victory in this war, which started with a grisly terrorist attack planned and sponsored by Iran, would deal a crushing blow to the Obama-Biden project of realignment with Iran, which remains the current administration’s real but unacknowledged policy in the Middle East. That realignment has in turn required seeding the generally pro-Israel and anti-terror American public with the idea that Israel isn’t actually a friend but rather a sectarian ethnostate with a pushy domestic lobby bent on dragging American boys into another pointless Mideast war, all so the Jews can continue kicking around the poor Palestinians—just like those bitter whites in flyover country who vote Trump because they want to kick around the Blacks and Mexicans. Which seems, in what is no doubt another coincidence, to be precisely the message of the protesters, who explicitly liken Zionism to domestic white supremacy.

Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/people-setting-america-on-fire-soros-tides-wespac 

→Michael Colangelo, the former Biden Department of Justice official who delivered opening arguments in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal trial of former President Donald Trump, was paid $12,000 by the Democratic National Committee for “political consulting” in 2018, Fox News reports. Colangelo served as principal deputy associate attorney general in the Biden DOJ before joining Bragg’s office in December 2022, following the resignations of prosecutors Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, who felt that Bragg was being too soft on Trump. In an illustration of how it’s all connected, Pomerantz and Dunne went on to found the Free and Fair Litigation Group, a legal nonprofit active in the (ultimately quixotic) campaign to disqualify Trump from office under the 14th Amendment. One of the largest donors to Free and Fair in 2022 was Eutopia Foundation, the nonprofit headed by Union Square Ventures managing partner Albert Wenger and his wife, Susan Danziger. As reported in the Tablet article linked above, Eutopia Foundation was also the single largest donor in 2022 to WESPAC, the fiscal sponsor of two of the primary groups behind the nationwide campus protests, National Students for Justice in Palestine and Within Our Lifetime. 

→In our April 12 Big Story, we noted that the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs was continuing to repeat the fake statistic that 72% of the dead in Gaza were women and children, even after the Gaza Ministry of Health abandoned that claim on April 1. Here’s another example of OCHA laundering fake news sourced from Hamas’ Government Media Office, courtesy of Elder of Ziyon: In Flash Update #160, published on May 1, OCHA reported that a 14-year-old boy in Gaza had suffered a “limb amputation” after “opening a can of booby-trapped food.” OCHA also repeated the GMO claim that “many people have been recently injured due to the explosion of booby-trapped cans of foods.” There’s just one problem: Viral claims of “booby-trapped food” have been around for months, and they were roundly debunked by France24 in January. The “cans” of “food” are in fact fuses used to set off mines, are clearly labeled as such, and do not explode when opened. But we look forward to a future Al Jazeera report on the booby traps, citing the United Nations, to be repackaged by Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill and thence to find its way into the President’s Daily Briefing so that Jake Sullivan or whoever can express his “deep concern” over “troubling reports” of war crimes. 

→Columbia announced Monday that it was canceling its main graduation ceremony in favor of college-specific “smaller-scale graduations,” according to The Wall Street Journal. The university was reportedly concerned about “security” and the potential disruption of the campus-wide commencement ceremony, which was scheduled to take place on the main green where anti-Israel protesters—some students and some not—have been camping out for several weeks. In caving to the protesters’ disruptions, the school is sending a strong message to its graduating seniors, which will serve them well as they ascend to the top rungs of American society. For the protesters: If you are obnoxious enough, you will eventually get what you want. For the normal students: You are hostage to your most annoying peers.  

→We covered the disqualification hearing for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in some detail on The Scroll; last week, The Daily Wire published an update on a dramatic piece of testimony from those hearings. Willis’ friend, Robin Yeartie, had testified that Willis had been in a romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade prior to hiring him to work on Willis’ RICO prosecution of Donald Trump and that Willis then had lied about the timeline of the relationship to the court. Yeartie knew this, she claimed, because she and Willis were such close friends that she had allowed Willis to live in her apartment. Willis and her camp claimed that she was not close with Yeartie but had been forced to occupy the apartment due to intimidation by racist mobs at her old home. Willis’ father, John Floyd III, testified that on one occasion, a mob showed up outside of Willis’ home at around 5:30 a.m. and shouted the “b-word” and the “n-word,” made violent threats, and scrawled racist graffiti on the home. Floyd also testified that they had called the South Fulton County police to deal with the incident. 

Luke Rosiak of The Daily Wire, however, contacted South Fulton Police and discovered that they had no files or records of any incidents relating to DA Willis’ home—except the impounding of an abandoned vehicle. South Fulton Police suggested that Fulton County police may possess the records, but Fulton County police also said they had no incident report, police report, or dispatch log for anything related to the home during the relevant time period.  

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Lost Encyclopedia of Jewish Artists, by Alyssa Quint

A world of avant-garde Jewish art was destroyed by the Holocaust, along with the ability of publishers and readers alike to see Jews simply as artists

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Genocide Enablers

Backing Hamas isn’t the first time the U.N. and ‘the international community’ have chosen the side of killers over their victims

by Ben Poser

April 7, 2024, marked six months since the largest genocidal mass murder of Jews this century; it also was the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the Rwandan genocide. Of the various similarities any rational person can discern between the two crimes, one stands out in its repulsiveness: Just as it was a generation ago, the United Nations is perhaps the greatest facilitator of genocide on Earth.

The U.N. was established in 1945 as a means of preventing two things: a “hot” world war on the numbing scale of the Second, and the extermination of any group of human beings based upon their identity. Innovations in nuclear weapons technology made the first too catastrophic to risk (thus moot), but the U.N.’s responsibility to stop genocide, codified the year of Israel’s rebirth, still stands. Unforgivably, since that time, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has never influenced the United Nations to stop any of the genocides which have occurred since the Holocaust.

In those postwar years, the U.N. has devoted much of its money and moral authority to attacking not Cambodia, China, Sudan, or Zimbabwe, but Israel—a country created by the survivors of genocide in the hope of preventing another. It must never be forgotten that when the General Assembly’s Resolution 3379 declared Zionism a form of racism in 1975, two genocides which had nothing to do with Jews—those in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Idi Amin’s Uganda—were occurring simultaneously, eventually killing approximately 3.3 million people combined. Similarly, post-2000, while issuing one defamatory resolution after another against Israel, genocide was occurring in Congo, Darfur, and, more recently, throughout Iraq and Syria at the hands of ISIS. But the latter took place during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in 2014, so, naturally, a U.N. commission later issued a report accusing Israel of committing “war crimes.”

Even more damning, though, is how the U.N.’s actions concerning Rwanda parallel its current mistreatment of Israel as it fights for its survival against jihadi armies.

Three months before the genocide began, on Jan. 11, 1994, General Roméo Dallaire, commander of the U.N.’s peacekeeping force in Kigali, urgently cabled U.N. headquarters with intelligence that the Hutu-dominated government was planning to exterminate all Tutsis in the country as part of its war against rebels of the same tribe in the north. A conscientious informant told the peacekeepers of his work training young men to kill Tutsis at the rate of 3,000 per hour and of crucial arms caches. Dallaire asked New York for permission to raid the caches, neutralizing the government’s ability to arm its Interahamwe killers. Peacekeeping headquarters responded, however, by demanding that Dallaire go nowhere near the weapons, share this critical intelligence with the very Hutu gangsters planning the murders, and avoid using force at all costs. Just as the U.N. knows today that its employees and agencies work directly with Hamas, and indoctrinate children to kill Jews, now as then, they do nothing and continue to fund the terrorists.

The man who ignored the information which arguably could have saved nearly a million lives was Kofi Annan, then U.N. under-secretary general for peacekeeping operations. Annan told PBS in 2004 that he ordered Dallaire to share his intelligence with the genocide’s architects because “sometimes it is a very good deterrent” to inform rogue states that “we know what you are up to”—as if such a tactic has ever worked before or since. Not surprisingly, during Belgian government investigations into the Hutus’ murder of Belgian peacekeeping soldiers, Annan blocked Dallaire from testifying, and declined to testify himself.

Annan made another telling remark in the PBS interview. Pointing the finger at Security Council members, the former secretary general noted that, although these states had even better intelligence than his office, he knew the “mood in the council”: The members, Annan said, were not going to say, “We are going to send in the brigade” or “send reinforcements to General Dallaire.” While clearly self-serving, Annan’s remark is a reminder of the complicity of the so-called “international community,” including the U.S., which, at the time, did not wish to even utter the word “genocide.” “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing,” Susan Rice, then director for international organizations and peacekeeping at the National Security Council, said, “what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?”

The author who later excoriated Rice for this comment was none other than Samantha Power, who, two decades later, would nevertheless join Rice in government as ambassador to the U.N., when the Obama administration was abetting the mass slaughter in Syria. In her current role as USAID administrator, Power, in order to advance the Biden administration’s obscene policy of “surging” aid to Gaza, has falsely claimed that Israel is causing a “famine.”

Annan’s boss during the genocide, then-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was the one responsible for covertly selling the Rwandan government much of their weapons stockpile in the first place. That $26 million worth of weapons, approved by Boutros-Ghali while still Egyptian foreign minister in 1990, made up a large part of the supplies the U.N. blocked Dallaire from seizing. Boutros-Ghali later dismissed Dallaire’s original fax as merely one among many “alarming reports from the field,” thus not worth serious consideration at the time. Once the genocide was in full flood, however, all Boutros-Ghali and Annan allowed Dallaire to do was attempt to negotiate an impossible cease-fire between the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front and the very government slaughtering their kin. Though he admitted to PBS in 2004 that “I failed in Rwanda,” he never truly took personal responsibility. When he traveled to Rwanda in 1995 and reluctantly visited the site of the barbaric Nyarubuye church massacre, he toured the untouched mounds of putrefied innocents for 18 minutes, told the living to be of good courage, and then left.

Current U.N. secretary general, Antonio Guterres, did something arguably worse 28 years later. Barely two weeks after Oct. 7, he appeared to give subtle justification to Hamas’ own Nyarubuye massacre of Jews, saying that it “did not happen in a vacuum.”

Still, perhaps the most stunning correlation between the U.N.’s abetment of genocide in Rwanda and in Israel 30 years later is its insistence upon “humanitarian” support for mass murderers and their civilian accomplices. A less-remembered side effect of the Rwandan civil war was the exodus of around a million Hutus into Tanzania and Zaire, whom the U.N. and international community aided lavishly. Many of these refugees were known at the time to have either supported the genocide’s aims or personally been part of the Interahamwe death squads, but they were given food, medicine, and shelter anyway. The thousands of killers among them became community leaders within the refugee camps and then, when the genocide was over, returned to their villages to live in sight of those few who had survived their butchery.

Today, the U.N. demands that Israel supply food, medicine, and shelter to people who passionately support Hamas and their genocidal exploits. Under severe U.S. pressure—including threats of stopping arms supplies, sanctions, and support for ICC prosecution of Israeli officials and IDF soldiers—Israel has been forced to oblige, even though they know that Hamas will steal the aid for itself, as it habitually does. The Biden administration has even begun constructing a $320 million pier to supply the terror group’s enclave, and is demanding Israel protect the aid convoys replenishing its enemy.

Nevertheless, there is one difference between the U.N.’s perfidy in Rwanda and hostility toward Israel. In Rwanda, the U.N.—even while often refusing to use the word—did understand that Hutus were, in fact, committing genocide against Tutsis. Today, however, the same U.N. actually accuses the victims of an act of genocide of being the murderers, while blessing the act’s perpetrators as the true victims.

It is only fitting, then, that one U.N. official reportedly described pointless cease-fire talks between the RPF and Hutu killers as “rather like wanting Hitler to reach a cease-fire with the Jews.” No observation could better encapsulate three decades of moral depravity dressed up as idealistic decency.